Bunshirou knew the lay of the land. To remain in hiding, one had to know the land and the obvious places to look and the places that enemy shinobi would overlook in their first and second sweeps, but would definitely check out on the third, by which point one would have moved on to a more obvious location they had sweeped before and been previously able to have sworn was completely empty.

It wasn't until we had put a day or two's distance between us and the border of Yuki no Kuni that he dared say anything other than "hide" and "quiet" and "here, eat one of these food pills." And then after that he wouldn't stop talking as he dumped his entire life story on me as if he expected me to understand and apply it right away. Even more annoying and worrying was that he did want to make sure I understood.

As one of the few of his clan who had managed to completely master the Imanara hiden jutsu during one of the Great Shinobi Wars, he had been forced into hiding by enemy-nin who wanted him dead for stealing their jutsu (even though he couldn't pass them on) and by his clanmates who had demanded that he pass on everything he knew, his secrets for how he had mastered the jutsu so effectively.

He didn't really have secrets to his skill, he said. The main things that contributed to it were that he practiced a ton within the three basic ninja arts and that, in regards to the hiden jutsu itself, he had gone back in his studies to the notes made by the first generation and spent time attempting to master the related parent techniques. He never did master them, at least not well enough to use them in combat with or without a well-informed support group, but as a result he had a far better understanding of the workings of the Imanara hiden jutsu. This in addition to a solid backing of fundamental skills made him the most effective Imanara in the history of the clan.

After all, without a solid grasp of the basics, how could anyone expect to survive as a shinobi? It was insane and asinine to rely on a single jutsu. That was why so many of their clansmen had fallen.

His clanmates had not much liked that answer. Surely he'd had some trick that extended beyond hard work and determination.

Furthermore, Bunshirou had had no silly dreams of grandeur, and, as he was not heir to the clan, he felt no obligation to throw his life away on an unreachable goal, especially when the rest of the Imanara were so deluded about the world and their ranking in it. See, the clan heir believed that the Imanara were on the same level as the Uchiha with their Sharingan, which not only indicated overconfidence in their own abilities but also a gross misunderstanding of what the Sharingan actually did as well as how formidable the Uchiha were even without their dojutsu. Somewhere along the line, a legend had even sprung up about how Natsuki, of the early second generation and in Bunshirou's direct line of ancestry, had managed to steal a Sharingan with the technique.

Dissatisfied with his answer and lack of enthusiasm for clan expansionism, the clan heir had rallied together the council (which I gathered was more of a clique) and the most ornery and senile of the elders to confront Bunshirou, but Bunshirou had already run for his life from his clan. Over the years as he moved further and further away from the western mainland he had heard rumors of the clan being scattered into remnant factions that none of the Five Great Nations would accept as part of their shinobi villages, and the few that did make it in barely got by in each village's genin corps.

These were the gist of the stories Bunshirou told me during our long treks through the snowy mountains of northwest Kaminari no Kuni, Lightning Country. It took nearly a month to get through all the tales of Imanara mediocrity and death and "it's such a shame that a once intelligent people was reduced to this so easily" and vows to keep me safe from the curse of pride.

Of course, it was obvious I already wasn't safe. I'd proven not to be mediocre and thus had already been targeted by Yuki-nin, which was annoying as all get-out because, if they had any shinobi allies in other countries, I had a painted target on pretty pink head.

I just had to maintain a careful lack of complacency and pride.

Frankly though, I think having Hamauzu blood in my system both helped and didn't help matters very much.I had the basic chakra control mastery of a genin already, and Naomi-kaa-san was a proud woman.

But I had to question Bunshirou's parenting skills in that he was entrusting all of this information to his four-year-old child, whom he had barely even gotten to know while being at work for so many hours, who had just suffered the trauma of losing her mother. Outwardly intelligent or not, four-year-olds should not be subject to that kind of talk. Heck, twenty-somethings shouldn't be subject to that kind of talk. Then again, this was the Narutoverse and not my old world, and social courtesies were different. For example, I was still getting used to the rules of bowing etiquette and not using polite speech all the time.

At least it was informative. I would know what mistakes not to make. The goal of every parent – for their children to learn from their parents' mistakes without having to make them personally.

Though I might have scared him with the scrolls of horrific sketches that I used to make sure I understood exactly what he wanted me to understand, each underlined with to him what must have been a string of English hieroglyphics all because of the language barrier that still persisted. But he trusted me, and he was patient even though we could have been spotted by enemy ninja at any time. This was Kaminari no Kuni, after all. Bunshirou said he didn't know of any relatives who had settled into Kumogakure no Sato, but he still didn't want to take the chance that there were or that he'd be sent out on a mission against one of them.

So that was how we tried to bypass Kumo at the end of the month. The snow and storms disappeared and the mountains grew shorter as they moved underwater, the water rising to lap at the bottoms of cliff faces.

It was also how I ended up with the worst pneumonia of either of my lives because Tou-san thought that was the time to teach me water walking even though I didn't know tree walking yet. I did master it easily enough, but that's beside the point.


"We must resume your training," Bunshirou said after a month of walking and boredom and silence other than thirty-one volumes of Tales of Imanara Mediocrity human audiobook and hurried instructions to suppress my chakra, which I wasn't good at yet.

"Oh. Okay," I replied.

I didn't know whether to be excited or nervous. I had never trained with Tou-san before - he was always working and so that had been Naomi-kaa-san's job. Frankly, I barely even knew the man at all, aside from the mysterious persona he kept up, always getting home late at night, mumbling about things I didn't understand, taking his tea and going to bed past my bedtime and being gone before I was awake. And now Bunshirou the lecturer as well. And then there were Naomi-kaa-san's goo-goo tirades between lessons that were too mushy and perhaps a bit too adult for me to be comfortable recounting as a four-year-old. (Shinobi academy wasn't developmentally appropriate, but romance was? Come on, Naomi-kaa-san!)

Where were we?

Oh yeah.

I settled for nervous.

"I don't know what all your mother has taught you, but I know she hasn't taught you this and you haven't needed it up until now."

I stood there, trying to guess what it was I was going to need now. We hadn't met anybody on our journey so it probably wasn't combat related. It was probably travel related.

"We're about to pass west of Kumogakure no Sato, and I can't carry you the whole way, so you're going to learn water walking."

Ah, that was it. I had noticed the growing presence of water, which up until very recently had had frozen icy surfaces, but I thought we'd gone further than that by now. I chalked it up to Tou-san having to travel slowly to make up for my tiny, slightly-faster-than-civilian-four-year-old travelling speed.

"Hold on," I said, my spidey senses tingling. "Aren't I supposed to learn tree climbing first?"

"How do you know what that is?"

Episodes from the Land of Waves Arc in that one show in my previous life where tree climbing somehow enabled three wet-behind-the-ears genin to defeat two A-rank shinobi, one with a formidable kekkei genkai, even though two of those genin (guess who) did receive absurd power boosts in the middle of the fight.

"Uh… Yukigakure no Academy?"

Definitely not Yuki Academy. Also, I'm pretty sure my grammar was off there. Also no thanks to Yuki Academy.

Bunshirou shook his head. "Normally yes, but there are no trees here and you'll basically be able to do that too once you master water walking."

I raised a brow. (Thank God I was still able to do that. I couldn't imagine a life where my left eyebrow only went up at the same time as my right eyebrow. How else was I supposed to silently yet clearly communicate my questioning of their words, motives, and everything about them?)

"Basically?" I asked.

He ignored my question and took my hands, turning me around so my back was to him and leading me toward the water.

"What you do is create a cushion of chakra on the soles of your feet and use it to keep from sinking into the water."

He raised my arms and I felt his chakra somehow go through my body, pooling in my feet. Together we stepped out onto the water, and with whatever technique he was using, stayed perfectly atop the surface. We didn't even make a ripple.

"Like so."

We stepped off the water back onto solid land, and the chakra flow stopped as he dropped my hands. "Do you think you can do that?"

I shook my head and struggled not to let my jaw shatter on the rocks below my feet and lose the pieces in the water nearby. "What did you just do? How did you do that?" I didn't even have words for what exactly he had done. "I want to learn that."

Bunshirou repeated his question. "Do you think you can walk on the water like we did just now?"

I was starting to get annoyed with his always trying to stay on topic. He was getting annoyed with my wanting to stray off to more interesting things or the one conflict in his words. I pouted a little and allowed him to win this battle.

"...Maybe."

No.

My face screwed up into concentration as I built up chakra and sent it into my feet.

And stepped out onto the water.

And propelled myself several feet out into the frigid water.

"Ah," he said, shaking his head as mine resurfaced and I swam back to the shore, a sliver of thankful that I remembered how to swim and the rest cranky because I was freaking cold. I thought living in Snow Country had fixed that for me but I guess not. Then again, cold air didn't have the penetrative power that cold water did, and not once had I been submerged in a frigid body of water up to that point.

"Outputting too much chakra will do that to you," he continued once I was no longer splashing my way out of the water and over his words.

I filed that somewhere far away as I focused on expelling the water from my sinuses.

"Try again?" he offered.

I glared at him, but got up anyway and built up my chakra again. This time I didn't amass so much in my feet, which was relatively easy to do since the blood vessels and chakra coils around them had constricted trying to keep my core warm. I stepped onto the water.

And sank in up to mid-thigh.

I caught a surface. I shuffled a little and noticed it wasn't rock. That had to be progress, right?

"Not enough chakra," he said unhelpfully. "Try using a little bit more."

I tried shunting more chakra into my feet to push them toward the surface, but my feet were numb now, and I ended up overcompensating and flinging myself further out into the water.

My return to the shore was quicker this time, using the too-much-chakra technique I had just accidentally learned to jet fuel my body back to shore. I filed that idea in the back of my mind for future reference.

Tou-san caught me, chuckling nervously as he hugged me with a freshly unsealed towel. It was also cold, but at least it was dry.

"Can we not?" I asked.

He nodded. "We'll do this again tomorrow."

All in all, it wasn't… terrible… training with Tou-san. I think.


I finally mastered standing and shuffling on the water - never fully picking up my feet and thus never fully shifting my weight - after a few days, and shortly afterward I felt my energy simply drain like sludge into the water I was learning to fully walk on.

I was sure it wasn't chakra exhaustion, or my technique would have broken.

I just felt a very very strong urge to take a nap. For five years.


"Kizuna-chan, what's wrong?" Bunshirou-tou-san asked after I gave up training early for the third day in a row.

"I think I'm sick," I said as I plopped down onto the water. I had been operating on chakra reserves rather than my physical stamina for the past two days, so now I was toeing the line of chakra exhaustion in addition to physical exhaustion.

Tou-san was on me in an instant, a piece of paper with a kanji I didn't recognize glowing green over his right eye. He eyed me through it, and sighed.

I didn't like that sigh.

I found myself on my back on a rock while he kneeled next to me, funneling the unmistakable green chakra of the Mystical Palm Technique into my system. Who knew Tou-san knew iryo-ninjutsu? Not I, said the Kizuna.

Didn't work. Actually I think I got worse. The next day I was coughing up a storm and the shivering was worse than my average everyday walking-through-and-sleeping-in-a-mountain-range-nonstop-in-winter shivering.

Training stopped, but travel didn't. Each day I woke up worse and would be subjected to more healing chakra, and then we'd press on.


"Take me to Kumo," I wheezed, barely able to take in enough air to say all of that in one breath, beginning to parrot the conversation we had had yesterday about the matter. And the day before. And the two days before that.

"No," he insisted, the glow of his healing jutsu pressed against my chest.

For all his (informed) skill in the basic ninja arts, he actually had very little in his iryo-ninjutsu and he might have actually been making me worse. I thought it was a miracle I was getting any air at all. And was my fever ever this high before? I wasn't even cold anymore. I ached all over. Lifting my head to cough was becoming too much of an effort, especially when coughing itself now included the sensation of being stabbed in the throat and chest with a cursed Morgul blade.

How did he expect my four-year-old body to cope with this much longer?

"Tou-san—" wheeze "—I can't breathe." Wheeze. "My head feels like—" wheeze "—it's gonna implode." Wheeze. "I wanna see—" wheeze "—a real healer." Wheeze. Cough cough hack hack hack HAGHGH HAGAHGAH ouch hurt ouch hurt HAGGHGHGAHG HAGHAG ow ow ow stop it, stop coughing, suppress the reflex suppress it hack hack ow ow suppress it stop it hurt pain oh no don't laugh don't cough resist the urge. Wheeze. "I wanna go to Kumo!"

"And what if someone recognizes us?" he cried, tears filling his violet eyes. "What if they kill you anyway?"

I groaned. "Gonna die anyway," I mumbled painfully. Why was he trying to reason with a four-year-old? Especially when my innards were so cooked from fever and oxygen-starved due to the amount of fluid in my lungs that I probably wasn't actually capable of thinking straight anyway.

"Don't ever say that!"

"Whatever," I murmured, letting myself fall slack on the rock bed. My head was so heavy. It hurt my neck to keep it held up to keep arguing with him. Everything was too heavy and it was too much effort to curl up in on myself. But lying flat only further restricted my breathing, and my chest rattled every time I tried to suck in air.

"Damn it," he whispered, and I knew I had finally won. He scooped up my numb body in his warm arms, an anchor in a sea of cold. I let myself drift.


The nightmares weren't any better than reality. I dreamed of my old life, but I was in bed, alone and paralyzed in a strange place, with pinching pains I couldn't explain in my hands and elbows, almost like snake bites except I had never actually been bitten by snakes so maybe not. Incessant beeping faded in and out of my perception as a masked man came in and groped my old body, which was no longer familiar to me. At least it was warm here, and I could breathe.

Holy crap, I could breathe again!

The sudden intrusion of air into my lungs startled me to wakefulness, and I found myself in a brightly window-lit room on a gurney, the headboard tilted so I was somewhat sitting up, and a C-shaped pillow-like thing was around my neck. An IV cannula was taped to the back of my hand, a mask was strapped to my tiny face, and I was no longer a trillion degrees feverish. As the world came back into focus, I saw Tou-san slouched over in a chair across the room, probably asleep. His glasses were folded on the side table and his mouse-brown hair was in dire need of a comb. It looked like he had been there for a while.

It was midday now, but with my inability to move due to all the tubing around me and nobody rushing to come see me, there was little point in staying awake.

When I awoke again, my mask was gone, a nasal cannula in its place, and a masked iryo-nin was pressing green chakra into my system. I had never felt anything like it. In addition to the almost numbing, soothing effects of it, I thought I could also feel the mucous lining in my airways being scraped clean, as if by a ton of tiny industrial-strength scrub brushes, and gathering mucus and fluids into a ball just below my gag point. It was getting difficult to breathe around the ball forming there, but that was quickly alleviated with a sudden tug that pulled the loogey out of my airway and out of my body like a projectile. I coughed violently afterwards as the iryo-nin pounded on my back, the yet-untreated pleurisy in my chest making it doubly painful and forcing me to stop while grasping at my chest to mitigate the pain. Had they done this to me before? I was glad I had been asleep then.

"Oh, you're awake," she said, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Tou-san perk up his head a little as my head tilted upward to get a better look at the iryo-nin. "Don't worry, little girl. We'll have you good as new in no time!"

I blinked. "'Kay."

I could feel the next round of mystical palm technique soothing the inflammation of my pleurisy, and I felt myself grow sleepy again from the sheer energy requirement of healing. That or more drugs were being pumped into my system. I wasn't really sure. Either way I was on a one-way train back to dreamland.


I woke up again in the late evening, judging by the dim amber lighting in the room and the position of the moon outside my window. Bunshirou-tou-san was in a chair next to me, hunched over. His elbows were perched on his knees and he was resting his forehead on his interlaced fingers, presumably staring down at the tile floor.

I could also hear purring that I hadn't heard before.

I knew I had been dreaming of at least one of my old life cats, but I knew better than to think that the sounds from that had bled over into my waking self. Or maybe I was still asleep and having a guilty dream.

I reached up and poked my cheek, digging in my stubby nail to the point of pain but not the point of bleeding or of making an indent that would last longer than a few minutes. Sure enough, the slight pain from that action felt very real.

So where the heck was that sound coming from?

"I'm sorry," I heard whispered beside me, distracting me from the purring. "I'm so sorry, Kizuna."

My shuffling must have alerted Bunshirou-tou-san to my being awake because he hadn't moved and was speaking.

"I never should have let you get so bad. It's all my fault."

"Tou-san…"

"We're going to learn iryo-ninjutsu," he continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "Both of us. And real iryo-ninjutsu. We'll never have to visit a hospital again."

He finally lifted his head to look at me, his eyes swollen and red and face wet from crying. I stared back at him blankly. He suddenly laughed softly and pathetically as he looked back down.

"Ah ha ha ha, I can't do anything without your mother."

I withdrew my gaze and attention, no longer interested in his continuing pained ramblings. I stared at my hands on my lap and lost myself again to the sound of purring in my ears.


A|N: I wanted to put out a longer chapter for you guys, but I guess that's just something I'll have to work up to.